The history of the publication of the first Chinese book in Vsemirnaia Literatura. New details about Pu Songling’s “Fox Charms”

The article aims to introduce into scholarly discourse new documents from the Archive of the A.M. Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences that shed light on the work of the famous sinologist Vasily Alekseev on the translation of the novelist Pu Songling in 1919. The history of the discussion of the Chinese author's works at the meetings of the Eastern Department is described. Some provisions of other researchers, reflected in the already written works on Pu Songling's translations, are clarified and revisited. The author of the article reconstructs the background of the study and first translations of the Chinese novelist and the presentation of his works by Alekseev to the staff of the Vsemir-naia Literatura [World Literature] publishing house. The significance of 1919 for the history of translations of works from Liaozhai Zhiyi [Strange Tales/Stories from a Chinese Studio] in Russia is emphasized: then, at the meetings of the Eastern Department, the question of the maximum possible transfer of Pu Songling's style by means of the Russian language was raised. This goal was set by Alekseev. The members of the Eastern Department discussed not only the concept of translation, but also the principles of drafting the preamble to the novels, their content, as well as the possibilities of publishing a Chinese writer. The published documents illustrate these processes and also shed light on the activities in Vsemirnaia Literatura of well-known writers (A.A. Blok and N.S. Gumilev) and scientists (S.F. Oldenburg, I.Y. Krachkovsky, V.M. Alekseev).

Keywords

Authors

References