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ABSTRACT
This article develops a multilayered analysis of the Estonian book series Loomingu Raamatukogu within the context of the Soviet Thaw. The series has been issued since 1957 and is principally devoted to translations of foreign literature. My argument takes the Thaw as a new field of uncertain possibilities and shows how a wide translation project became the catalyst for experimentation in the gray zone between the allowed and the forbidden. Investigating the entanglement of different levels of contextual analysis through the prism of Loomingu Raamatukogu lets us refine our understanding of the Thaw and of the complex possibilities and constraints that shaped the performative capacity of cultural agents in the Soviet 1960s.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. An interesting exception is Polly Jones’ article ‘The Thaw Goes International: Soviet Literature in Translation and Transit in the 1960s’ (Citation2013b), though it does not consider the ‘transit’ direction that interests us here, which is from the West to the Soviet Union.
2. Glavlit (an abbreviation of Glavnoe upravlenie po delam literatury i izdatel’stv, translating as the Main Administration for Literary and Publishing Affairs) was the Soviet agency responsible for censorship.
3. That LR changed the format as early as the second year of its activity is a clear measure of the instrumental character of mimicry. The cultural significance of LR goes well beyond that of its Russian ‘original.’
4. Yurchak (Citation2005, 25) has similarly stressed the use of ritualized, authoritative forms of discourse in late socialism as acts which ‘are not about stating facts and describing opinions but about doing things and opening new possibilities.’
5. This is an important difference between LR and Inostrannaya Literatura, which was exclusively dedicated to translated fiction.
6. The analysis of textual omissions and manipulations falls beyond the scope of this article, but it is interesting to observe that Sherry’s analysis of puritanical censorship in the translations from American literature in Inostrannaya Literatura is only partially confirmed by an analysis of the same translations in LR. In Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, for instance, the Estonian translator follows the Russian translator in replacing the slang word ‘flit’ used by Holden to describe his teacher Mr. Antolini with the euphemism ‘with quirks/oddities.’ In other passages of the translation, however, the Estonian slang equivalent of ‘flit’ (lilla) is used. This is a good example of dissimilation in assimilation, or the need to keep an eye on ideological correctness while testing and, possibly, extending the limits of what could be said. On Salinger’s Russian translation by Rait-Kovaleva see Semenenko (Citation2016).
7. It is interesting to observe that LR’s translation of Kafka’s novel was accompanied by a translation of the chapter on Kafka from Roger Garaudy’s book D’un réalisme sans rivages (1963). Garaudy was a French writer, philosopher and member of the Communist Party, so that the decision to include his text in the Kafka issue could be considered another case of camouflage, except that at the time of the publication Garaudy had been expelled from the Central Committee of the French Communist Party. Two years later he would criticize the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and, in 1970, he was finally expelled from the party. LR’s editor, Hiedel (Citation2006), describes the inclusion of Garaudy’s chapter in the translation as a ‘sinful idea’, which made the Kafka issue of LR even more problematic from an ideological point of view.
8. Eesti Kirjandusmuuseumi arhiiv (Archive of the Estonian Literary Museum), KM EKLA, f 283:845, 90.
9. When the Latvian Writers’ Union tried to start a similar series in Latvia at the end of the 1960s, it encountered opposition from the authorities.
10. The absence of copyright issues in the first period of LR’s activity meant there was no need for centralized judicial and economic mediation.
11. Glavlit carried out both preventative censorship by approving texts for publication and post-publication censorship.
12. The erasure of the names of persecuted authors from the written word circulating in the Union was a common means of Soviet censorship (see Monticelli Citation2016).
13. Research work is hindered here because a lot of material has been lost.
14. Caroline Humphrey (Citation2008) has employed the term ‘creative bureaucrat’ to refer to this uncertainty and partial openness in the attitudes of functionaries toward ideological and censorship issues. As Sherry (Citation2012, 275) observes, ‘censorial agents acted in ways that benefited authoritarian power, by limiting discourse and imposing the authoritative discourse upon the foreign texts. However, they also acted in ways that undermine the censorial authority. This is achieved through a creative challenging of censorship norms, and by the privileging of the performative aspect of discourse.’
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Daniele Monticelli
Daniele Monticelli is a Professor of Italian Studies and Semiotics at Tallinn University. His research covers a wide, interdisciplinary range of interests that includes translation theory, literary semiotics, Italian studies, and contemporary critical theory, with a particular focus on the political thought of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, and Jacques Rancière. He studies the cultural and ideological aspects of translation, and the role of translation in constructing and deconstructing national identity, and in social change and totalitarian regimes. He has a long record of participation in collaborative research projects in the fields of linguistics, semiotics, and translation studies, and from 2010 to 2012 he led the research grant ‘Translators (Re)shaping Cultural Repertoire’ from the Estonian Science Foundation. He co-edited the volume ‘Between Cultures and Texts. Itineraries in Translation History’ (2011).