The first Russian translation of the first matter-of-fact romance by Ch. Reade It's Never Too Late to Mend

In the present paper the first matter-of-fact romance by Ch. Reade It's Never Too Late to Mend is analyzed. The romance under study stood at the origins of that genre formation in the Victorian literature of the mid-to-late 19th century. Moreover, a con-trastive analysis of the first Russian translation of the romance is conducted; the outset of its reception in Russia is examined. The given translation was made at the same time with the publication of the original version in England: It's Never Too Late to Mend was published in 1856, whilst the first translation version Luchshe pozdno, chem nikog-da: roman v dvukh chastyakh [Better Late Than Never: A Romance in 2 Parts] came out in Russia in 1857. To begin with, it is necessary to mention that the matter-of-fact romance synthesizes the poetic style of at least two manners: realism and romanticism. The matter-of-fact romance appeared in the era of realism and entered into a tense dialogue with romanticism, which was characteristic for the literature of the 19th century in general. There are always two ideas in Reade's romances: an authentic, true and objective depiction of real life and, at the same time, his authorial perceived conceptualization. Consequently, there are always two strands in the plot in his romances: the reflection of real (documentary "proved") facts revealing keen social conflicts based on the structure and activities of social institutions of the Victorian society and bright adventure and love story in the plot. Besides, Victorian literature stems from educational ideology subjecting modern society to criticism as well as propagandizing the author's active influence on various sins of the society. Ch. Reade was widely known among his contemporaries as the author of romances revealing abuse, corruption and injustice in social institutions of Victorian England and insisting on social reforms. The writer gave priority to a pedantic study of a real incident, which, later, provided the basis for the plot of his romances. Nevertheless, we might observe that the writer under consideration made active use of imaginative principles in his work: real facts were interpreted through the prism of the author's perception of the events and presented to the readers with the reference to the author's personal opinion. The translation, for all its differences from the original, of course, set the stage for the genre model of the novel, which matured in Russian literature and coincided with the Western European novel in its aspirations to a new understanding of reality as an object image in literature. In this way the Russian classic novel incorporates features of many genre varieties of the European novel, including the matter-of-fact romance. However, the analysis showed that the beginning of the translation reception of It's Never Too Late to Mend and in general of the matter-of-fact romance by Ch. Reade in Russia was largely due to the context of mass literature.

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