Author's project of alternative literary process: pseudo-translations by F. Grimberg of 1990s

In the 1990s in the Russian book publishing had a situation reminding the beginning of the Soviet 1920s when commercial and ideological fiction had a number of authors-"foreigners" with quite plausible pseudonyms, which satisfied the common interest of the time in foreign literature. A share of such literature was pseudo-translations. Critics-formalists, B. Eykhenbaum and V. Shklovsky, wrote about it. Ideological literature also had falsifications. At the beginning of the market era of the 1990s domestic fiction was still forming. Foreign authors headed lists of best-sellers. Pseudo-translated detective stories, fantasy, romance and erotic novels were widespread, like at the beginning of the 20th century. Foreign pseudonyms had an obvious game nature. For the unsophisticated reader the name of the author was the indicator of the foreign origin of the text. A unique pseudo-translation project of the 1990s belongs to Faina Grimberg. Among the reasons that induced Grimberg to make pseudo-translation falsification are the following: 1) there already existed manuscripts focused on foreign culture and historical realities written in the Soviet period; 2) it was impossible to publish her own works in the Soviet publishing houses; 3) the features of the narrative structure of the first works belonging, by the plan of the author, to pseudo-authors; 4) feeling of her own marginality, where her provincialism was complicated by the national factor - her Jewish origin, and by her ambitions of an underestimated poetess and writer; 5) problems with personal and cultural identification, "melancholy for world culture", which gave an impulse to learn different national cultures, languages, historical realities that later became the material for Grimberg's historical novels. The economic situation in the publishing market of the 1990s promoted fast publication of pseudo-translations. From 1991 to 1995 such pseudo-translations by Grimberg are published successively: story "The Flute Player on the Chasovoy Hill", story "The Dress of the Moon Colour" (by a pseudo-author: a French writer Jeanne Bernard), the novel "Lovers of the Old Maid" (on behalf of invented Hungarian authors Mikhai Keesha and Maria Va-radi who wrote under the pseudonym Clari Botond Grimberg), "Secret of Magic Knowledge", "The Concubine of the Pharaoh" (on behalf of a German writer Jacob Lang, "The Ghost of the Musician" (on behalf of a Turk Sabakhatdin-Bohr Etergyun). The project ''Club of Suicides'' where Grimberg included the works of her authors who committed suicide, and one original translation of Stefan Zweig's unfinished novel "Christina Hoflehner'' became the full pseudo-translation author's project assuming publishing of a series of novels by authors with the similar biography. This project was original due to the following real author's strategies: 1) formation of a complex system of invented instances mediating each other, 2) mix of translation and pseudo-translation within the series, 3) inclusion of Grimberg's poems in the text of novels - peculiar hints to experienced readers. In the subsequent experiences of pseudo-translations by Grimberg redundancy of masking (the novel "Beauty" under Catharina Fuchs's English pseudonym - Cathrine Randolph) is obvious. The trilogy '' Destinies of the Turkish Woman, or the Times of Empire'' written on behalf of two authors ( a Turk Sabakhatdin-Bohr Etergyun and a Bulgarian Sofia Grigorova-Alieva) became a noticeable stage of Grimberg's literary career. Here the reasons of plurality of pseudo-translations and pseudo-authors that the author might not realize herself became clear. The number and diversity of the cultures and ethnoses Grim-berg used to some extent confirm her claims for creation of an "alternative" literary process. At least, the uniqueness of this pseudo-translation project of the 1990s is evident.

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