American and British Tolstoy: Reception in the End of the 19th — Beginning of the 20th Centuries

Abstract

L.N. Tolstoy’s works, having been introduced to the English-reading audience, immediately became an issue of active critical discussions. British and American readers got acquainted with them differently than Russian ones —publications didn’t follow the chronological order, his fictional and philosophical books appeared simultaneously; the process of cultural transfer inevitably fragmented his work, took it out of context, and the readers in Britain and the USA perceived Tolstoy’s works in accordance with his image formed at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. Besides the linguistic cultural barriers (it was necessary to work with Russian realities, facts of Russian life, make them clearer for foreign readers), translators and critics faced with other challenges — for example, they were to bring Tolstoy’s work into the circle of topics and subjects familiar to the English — reading public. Tolstoy entered the English speaking culture as a symbol of realism, which however didn’t mean hard naturalism, but rather ethical and psychological realistic writing, especially taking into account the ongoing discussion on Zola’s novels. Tolstoy’s realism was treated as a universal one, based on the well-known cultural and spiritual values and therefore especially significant in spite of the exotic subject matter of his works. The didactic nature of his work, its powerful moral appeal was obvious and strongly sought for in the period of heated argument about the social system, the problems of the industrial society, gender relations, etc., — despite the fact that some episodes were incompatible with Victorian or Puritan attitudes and tastes of his English-speaking readers.

Keywords

• leo tolstoy
• russian novel
• realism
• translation
• cultural transfer
• reception