Translation Reception of Charles Reade's Historical Novel The Cloister and the Hearth in Russia (1860s): A Genre Aspect

The present research is devoted to the study of genre characteristics of the historical fiction The Cloister and the Hearth (1861) written by the famous English belletrist Charles Reade as well as to the translation reception of the novel in Russia in the 1860s. The novel under study represents a genre synthesis comprising a “matter-of-fact” romance, a sensation novel, a philosophical and historical novel focused on the interweaving of problems of “Big History” and a particular person's life history considered through psychologism as the most important method to depict a person in history. Thus, following the canons of the historical novel genre established by Walter Scott, Reade became one of Scott's successors in the development of the genre model under study and created his own unique version of a historical novel. It is also necessary to note that The Cloister and the Hearth is probably the only Reade's literary work that received exclusively positive reviews from both foreign and domestic literary critics. The complete version of the novel, devoted to the events that developed in Europe in the 15th century, was published in England in 1861. The Russian translation entitled Monastyr' i lyubov' [The Cloister and Love] was published in series in Volumes 141, 143, 144, and 145 of the established native literary magazine Otechestvennye Zapiski in 1862. The Russian translation is a sample of the translator's professional manner: there are practically no omissions in the text and deviations from the author's idea of the original, Reade's writing style is fully preserved as well. The comparative analysis of the Russian translation and the original revealed that the Russian translation reception of the novel was determined by the demand for the mentioned genre model in Russian literature among the wide readership. The beginning of the 1860s (when the Russian translation of Reade's novel was published) was known as one of the most watershed periods in Russian history. This had an impact on Russian literature, both classic and “popular”, which turned to the philosophy of history, the principles of historical narrative. The demand for Reade's genre search in the Russian literary process was confirmed by the high quality of the translation and the translational strategies by means of which the novel was presented to an ordinary Russian-speaking reader: the translator hardly ever made extensional and pervasive changes in the original version.

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