"O divã de tia Sônia", um conto de Mikhail Kuzmin

Tradução para o português brasileiro do conto “O divã de tia Sônia” (Кушетка тёти Сони), do escritor Mikhail A. Kuzmin (1872-1936), precedida por uma breve nota introdutória a respeito do texto e do processo de tradução. Primeiro escritor russo a tratar da homossexualidade em seus textos, a prosa de Kuzmin tem sido pouco estudada e traduzida.

Mikhail Kuzmin and the Underground

This article focuses on the role of the poet, playwright, and novelist Mikhail Kuzmin as one of the first underground authors, whose circle in the 1920s–1930s became a prototype for analogous communities in the 1960s–1970s. Kuzmin had been associated with OBERIU and Nikolai Kliuev during his lifetime. The posthumous influences of Kuzmin’s poetry and drama are detected and discussed in the works of such underground authors as Vsevolod Petrov, Andrei Egunov, Joseph Brodsky, and Evgenii Rein, as well as such “in-betweeners” as Aleksandr Kushner and Oleg Chukhontsev.

“The Star of Venusˮ in Russian poetry of the 20th century: mythopoetic symbolism

Being a part of the astronomical, temporal, anthropomorphic linguocultural codes, Venus as a celestial body has a significant place in the Russian verbal culture. This statement can be proved not only when analysing linguistic units, but also when referring to literary works, in particular to Russian lyric poetry. Twenty four poetic contexts, which include the image of Venus, have been analysed in the article (the works by Alexander Pushkin, Georgy Adamovich, Pavel Antokolsky, Leonid Martynov, Mikhail Zenkevich, Alexander Blok, Vyacheslav Ivanov, Nikolay Gumilyov, Marina Tsvetaeva, Fyodor Sologub, Mikhail Kuzmin, Georgy Shengeli, Ilya Selvinsky, Konstantin Simonov, Anatoliy Demyanov). The authors focus on the Russian 20th century lyric poetry because it is there that Venus appears as a star rather than a planet, and this corresponds to the archaic notions of this celestial body. Mercury and Mars are also called 'stars' in the 20th century poetry, but in a much smaller number of contexts than Venus. The authors come to the conclusion that Venus in Russian poets’ works can symbolise the onset of morning / evening, love, paradise, loneliness, fate, youth, old age, life journey. Moreover, Venus is included into poetic conceptions (it corresponds to the image of the Beautiful Lady in Alexander Blok’s poetry). The set of the above-mentioned symbolic meanings correlates with the archaic notions of Venus, widens them and makes the image of this celestial body mythopoetic.

“The Trout Breaks the Ice” by Mikhail Kuzmin: Verse and Grammar

The author explores various compositional levels of the Russian modernist author Mikhail Kuzmin’s long poem “The Trout Breaks the Ice”. The levels are: (1) the grammatical tenses vs. the astronomical time (non-finite verb forms (imperative) are also assumed to indicate time); (2) the meters of this polymetric poem; (3) realistic vs. symbolic and (4) static vs. dynamic narrative modes. The analysis is done by the chapter, and the data are summarized in five tables. It turned out that certain features regularly co-occur, thus supporting the complex composition of the poem. In particular, the present tense and time regularly mark the realistic and static chapters written in various meters, whereas the past tense and time are specific to the realistic and dynamic chapters written in iambic pentameter. The article sheds new light on the compositional structure of Kuzmin’s poem and the general principles of poetic composition.

Beardsley Men in Early Twentieth-Century Russia: Modernising Decadent Masculinity

This article explores the reception of the Decadent artist Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898) in Russia concentrating on new gendered meanings acquired by ‘Beardsleyism’ in modernist Russian culture. While the so-called ‘Beardsley Woman’ became a widely discussed literary construct and journalistic trope in Britain, the imagination of Russian artists and literati was captured by a ‘Beardsley Man’. Due to the circulation of the artist's portraits and descriptions by modernist periodicals such as Sergei Diaghilev's Mir iskusstva (1899–1904), a specific form of male (self-)representation emerged in the homophile art circles of St Petersburg and Moscow. Exploring this new urban Russian masculinity, I use the case studies of four men who were compared to Beardsley or used Beardsley as a model in their work and self-fashioning: artist Nikolai Feofilaktov, poet Georgii Ivanov, writers Mikhail Kuzmin and Iurii Iurkun.

«Военные рассказы» М. Кузмина: Попытка реинтерпретации [Toward the Reinterpretation of Mikhail Kuzmin’s _War Stories_]

The article analyzes War Stories (Voennye rasskazy, 1915) by Mikhail Kuzmin and offers a new interpretation of the book’s pragmatics. Most students of War Stories have not treated this collection in much detail, mainly seeing it as Kuzmin’s unsuccessful attempt to become a part of the mainstream patriotic movement during WWI. Contrary to her predecessors, Alexandra Pakhomova argues this particular book has a definite and consciously motivated authorial strategy. What Kuzmin did in War Stories was an attempt to establish his new literary reputation, and also to create an entirely new genre of short fiction in Russian literature. KEYWORDS: 20th-Century Russian Literature, Mikhail Kuzmin (1972—1936), Voennye rasskazy (1915), Literary Reputation, History of Literature.

Whither drifted “The Sailors of Marseilles” in 1917?

The article analyzes the history of lesser-known literary union “The Sailors of Marseilles” that existed in Petrograd in 1917. Mikhail Kuzmin was the central figure and the most popular writer in this union. Other “sailors” were young poets who wanted to reach out the audience and to get the opportunity for publication. Until now, this union has not been studied in the context of Kuzmin’s oeuvre, literary reputation and author’s strategies. Some conclusions have been made in the process of our research. First of all, Kuzmin’s attitude to literary unions has been specified. As we can see, he considered literary groups as a commonwealth of independent authors exploiting shared writing technics. On the other hand, he did not approve ideological unification within such unions. Denying hierarchy in literary groups, Kuzmin strove to create a literary union on an equal footing. He emphasized the individuality of each “sailor” to create to make it real, but in fact, this union was just adopting Kuzmin’s techniques, i.e., it followed the authoritative model. It should be mentioned, that the organization of the group was also the Kuzmin’s endeavour to assert his literary reputation that was in decline during 1917. Moreover, the whole concept of “The Sailors of Marseilles” was carried in accordance with the nautical symbolics developed by Kuzmin in 1917. The sea was the sign of power and war, and the sailors were the image of fraternity capable to contradict this power. “The Sailors of Marseilles” in the final count can be considered as creative-life Kuzmin’s project.

„Bukvalistide kukutamise“ alguse juurde: 1934. aasta / Towards the Description of the Beginning of “the Overthrow of the Literalists”

Artiklis vaadeldakse eellugu nähtusele, mida Andrei Azov nimetas „bukvalistide kukutamiseks“ ning mis viis pooleks sajandiks nn nõukogude tõlkekoolkonna monopolini. Selle nähtuse algust näeme 1934. aastas, mil ilmusid ja said professionaalse arutelu objektiks silmapaistavate vene filoloog-tõlkijate Gustav Špeti ja Boriss Jarho novaatorlikud võõrapärastavad tõlked ja samal ajal seoses Nõukogude kirjanike esimese kongressiga leidis aset toores heteronoomia sissetung tõlkevälja ning tekkis sellest heteronoomiast kasu lõikav kriitiline diskursus. Olulisemate filoloog-tõlkijate hukkumine suure terrori ajal aitas kaasa kriitikute võidukäigule tõlkijate üle ja sealhulgas vene tõlkeajaloo retrospektiivsele moonutamisele, mida käesolev artikkel püüab parandada. Toetudes Lawrence Venuti tuntud teooriale võõrapärastavast ning kodustavast tõlkest, on seda dihhotoomiat diferentseeritud vastavalt nõukogude heteronoomsetele tingimustele. The article discusses the pre-history of what Andrey Azov famously called “the overthrow of the literalists”, and the beginning of the half-a-century domination of the “Soviet school of translation” in Russia. It aims to locate and scrutinise the moment when the previous translation trend, later pejoratively labelled as “literalism”, gave way to the “Soviet school”. In the post-war years, the Russian translators Evgeny Lann and Georgy Shengeli were subjected to harsh criticism as “literalists” by the literary critic, translator and translation theorist Ivan Kashkin. In the official history of Soviet translation as outlined in the Literary Encyclopedia (1968), they were presented as key figures of a translation trend, also labelled “formalist” and “technologically exact”, both post- and pre-war. This version of the history of Soviet translation, still resounding even in Azov’s study (2013), is strongly distorted and needs to be rewritten in a more analytical way. Primarily, the term “literalists”, that was used loosely and pejoratively at the time, can by no means serve as instrumental today. One of the most adequate self-labels of this trend in translation that had its heyday throughout the 1930s, notably in the activities of the Academia publishing house and the Commission for the Study of Literary Translation at the Moscow State Academy of Art Sciences (GAKhN), is “artistically scientific”. In order to describe the trend adequately it should be noted that the “nomination” of Lann and Shengeli as “literalists” and the main targets of post-war criticism owes primarily to the fact that the much more influential key figures of this “school”, mentioned in the Literary Encyclopedia (1934) as the “best present-day translators” – Mikhail Kuzmin, Adrian Pyotrovsky, Boris Yarkho, Mikhail Petrovsky – had either died (Kuzmin) or fallen victim to the great purges that hit also the GAKhNovites, including Gustav Shpet. Their names became unmentionable, while the translation projects and discussions of the 1930s associated with them could not be properly considered in translation histories. In order to reconstruct the true history of Soviet translation they have to be restored to their rightful place. The pivotal point that marked both the acme of the “artistically scientific” translation, as well as the beginning of its demise, was the year 1934. It famously saw the First All-Union Congress of Writers at which translation was declared not the “private domain of a couple of literary pedants, not the academic theme for a philologist’s thesis, but an affair of utmost state importance”. Integration of translation into Stalinist national politics (discussions at the Writers’ Congress were centred on the interests of Soviet nationalities and on praising the free translations made by poets) resulted in a drastic decline of autonomy in the field and in the competition between critics profiting from the heteronomy concerning who would define the true “Soviet translation” and thus have the power to judge. The brilliant samples of scientifically founded translations of classics that appeared in 1934 – Boris Yarkho’s rendition of the medieval romance La Chanson de Roland and Gustav Shpet’s new Russian Dickens and Shakespeare (both to become virtually erased from the history of Soviet translation later on) became the focal point of the dispute over what “Soviet translation” should be. The article reconstructs both Yarkho’s and Shpet’s philologically based translation premises and the conflicting reception of their work by fellow philologists and by politically motivated critics. The transcript of a 1934 discussion held after Evgeny Lann’s report on the principles of the new Dickens translations preserved in the archives clearly shows that, at the time, all discussants, including Kashkin, addressed not Lann but Shpet as the real source of these principles and that it was only after Shpet’s arrest and death that the spearhead of criticism was aimed at Lann (who, unlike Shpet, unfortunately lacked the philological and spiritual stamina and weight to confront it decisively). As for Yarkho’s attempt to invent a Russian poetic diction adequate for rendering French syllabic verse and the heterogeneous style of the medieval war epic, it was both daring and philologically grounded and had been highly praised as a model “Soviet translation” by major philologists working in the field of translation, e.g. Mikhail Alexeev, Alexander Smirnov and Rosalia Shor. At the same time, critics trying to speak in accordance with the political line would criticise it harshly, programmatically declaring their preference for the outdated free-verse translation into Russian made by de la Barthe. In the history of Soviet translation, the transition from the “artistically scientific” or, to use a more familiar term, foreignising trend that had been flourishing throughout the 1930s and given brilliant practical as well as theoretical results, to a domesticating, ahistorical “Soviet school” that lacked theoretical reflection was not a natural evolution. Instead, it constituted a brutal intrusion of heteronomy into the field of translation, the triumph of politically oriented literary critics over professional translators and philologists that was strongly facilitated by the fact that many of the latter were repressed and, consequently, their names and works were erased from the history of Soviet translation.

Russian Poets and the October Revolution: Alexander Blok, Sergey Yesenin, Mikhail Kuzmin and Others

The article considers the question of the ideological and creative evolution of famous Russian poets at a turning point in the history of the twentieth century - during the years of the active formation of a totalitarian state system and its aesthetic socialist-realist doctrine. Revolutionary maximalism, the idea of a complete renewal of all being, came not only from Marxism and the Bolsheviks, but was also prepared by literature, long before the revolution, it had already “artistically matured” in the poetry of Alexander Blok, Sergey Yesenin, Osip Mandelstam, Vladimir Mayakovsky and many others. There is every reason to assert that the sources of Soviet literature as a cultural phenomenon were not only party leaders, not only so called proletarian culture and commissaries, but also honest artists who were ready to see in the cruelty of the revolution the right path to the cardinal renewal of life that their soul, which was full of angry denial of the world. The authors of the article argue that, having survived “belated insight”, Russian poetry in the person of Alexander Blok, Sergey Yesenin, Andrey Bely, Mickhail Kuzmin and others began a dramatic struggle for humanistic ideals and creative freedom.