L’Orpheline de Montmartre: A Newly Discovered Novel by Very Popular in Russia Writer

Abstract

The article presents the history of the search for Louis Boussenard’s novel L’Orpheline de Montmartre undertaken by the author since 2011. The French original of this work was lost, the title is totally unknown to French specialists, and the only evidence of its creation was a pre-revolutionary translation into Russian. The author of the article analyses the translation of E.N. Kiselyov, identifies the narrative elements characteristic of Boussenard, which make it possible to exclude the falsification of authorship, establishes the date of the first publication of the Russian translation, and finds sporadic mentions of this novel in French sources. The analysis of these documents allows to put forward a hypothesis that the novel in question was published in the Parisian daily “La Petite République” and reprinted by an unknown regional socialist newspaper. This hypothesis was exactly confirmed after the digitization in 2015 of the daily socialist newspaper “L’Égalité de Roubaix-Tourcoing.” The result of this discovery was the first book publication of the novel L’Orpheline de Montmartre in French (2017).

Keywords

• louis boussenard
• l’orpheline de montmartre
• novel
• serial novel
• western
• newspaper
• cut
• translation
• abridged translation