par Ioffe, Dennis 
Référence Canadian-American Slavic studies, 57, 1-2, page (240-246)
Publication Publié, 2023-12-01
Référence Canadian-American Slavic studies, 57, 1-2, page (240-246)
Publication Publié, 2023-12-01
Article révisé par les pairs
| Résumé : | José Vergara’s fascinating monograph, All Future Plunges to the Past, is focused on one of the most thought-provoking subjects in Anglo-Russian literary relations: the reception of James Joyce (and his literary revolution) in Russia. The author has had some important predecessors, notably Neil Cornwell in Britain and Sergei Khoruzhiy in Russia, who have written extensive monographs on the subject. Cornwell offered a positivist critical study and mainly focused on empirical facts, evidence and documents. His book James Joyce and the Russians dealt with Joyce’s complex relationship to Russian literature, Joyce’s Russian milieu, the reactions of Russian and Soviet critics to his novel Ulysses, the famous debates on the advisability of publishing Ulysses in the USSR, the tragic lot of the translators of Ulysses and finally the research and publication of Joyce’s texts in the late Soviet period. Sergei Khoruzhiy’s already mentioned volume (Ulysses in the Russian Mirror), which first appeared as a detailed afterword to Joyce’s three-volume edition (1994) and later published as a separate book, was not strictly speaking an academic study, but rather a perplexed carnival of genres, combining philological work with essayistic and witty artistic observations in the spirit of James Joyce himself. Sergei Khoruzhiy who analyzed Ulysses and some related texts in Russian literature (most prominently Andrei Bely’s Petersburg), noted Joyce’s personal but passing acquaintance with Soviet and émigré writers (Nabokov, Ehrenburg, Vishnevsky, Babel), created a periodization of Joyce’s reception in the USSR and, more importantly, considered the theme of Joyce’s relations with Sergei Eisenstein. José Vergara’s book attentively traces Joyce’s influence on Russian literature, which still remains to a large extent terra incognita. The lack of obvious historic “reception” (and even “perception”) can be partially explained by the extraordinary complexity of the original texts, which require a high-level of command of the English language, and by the inaccessibility to the general Russian reader of early translations of Ulysses. Moreover, one should not forget that radical artistic experiments in the spirit of Joyce were not encouraged during the Soviet period, when modernism was more or less rejected. Naturally, the first mass publication of a complete translation with commentaries in 1989 changed this situation. Indeed, Ulysses, which appeared in 12 issues of the journal Foreign Literature with an introduction by the grand master of Soviet philology, Academician Dmitry Likhachev, caused a profound reaction in philological circles and some astonishment among common readers, who produced an outpouring of enthusiastic as well as indignant letters to the editors. |
